The attention economy as MMORPG

I don’t like too much the concept “Attention Economy”. I prefer focus my attention on grasping concepts such as Reputation Economy and Gift Economy. Nevertheless I loved the following definition from “The Real Nature of the Emerging Attention Economy” 2006 Etech by Michael H. Goldhaber (slides in PDF).

An Economy, Most Generallyâ€¦..
â€¢ is a massively multiplayer
â€¢ SINGLE-LEVEL game
â€¢ that involves some kind of passing of
â€¢ scarce entities
â€¢ between players
â€¢ so as to knit all players intricately together

So, don’t you think it is time we all level up together? Maybe not just one but two or three levels?

About the Firefox banner, I understand your point, but I feel very important to do something for keeping the Web free, based on standard protocols (HTTP) and standard languages (HTML) and in which innovation can happen on the edges. I think Microsoft is dangerous for the Web, because, controlling a large percentage of the browsers in the world, it can shape the future of the Web (changing slightly the accepted HTML for instance, in a way similar to what microsoft does with the secret format .doc which does not allow competition and free market of office suites).
I think the code of the browsers should be free software so that there isn’t a single entity that can control how the people of the world perceive the Web.
And the banner is my small contribution for what I believe in.
Anyway, I’ll try to make the banner smaller and less intrusive.
If I may ask, why don’t you use Firefox for browsing the Web?

To answer your question, I have used IE since somewhere close to 1.0 and it works fine for me. So I don’t add other software because, for my purposes, what I have is not broken and I don’t want to have to administer more software, security updates, etc., with yet another source.

It’s a marginal utility versus complexity of operation trade-off for me. The marginal utility is not enough for me to make my administration of my own and my family systems more complicated.

Also, although I agree that monoculture is risky, my appraisal of the alleged Microsoft deviousness is not the same as yours, and that is also a factor in my personal trade-off decisions.